Thursday, July 26, 2007

MMRPG: Torn City

MMRPG or Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Games have been been around for quite a while. But while most of the modern day versions are heavy on graphics and have immensely large memory requirements not to mention the demand on broadband, text based MMRPG's have been around for quite a while. One of these MMRPG's that I came across is Torn City.
While you cannot see your surroundings in this game, what you can do is to make sure that you are constantly moving up by improving your statistics like speed, strength, intelligence, defence and so on. While this game does involve a lot of crime, strategic alliances are the need for the day. You can keep to yourself and grow in stature as a reputed brain surgeon or you could go on to become the next Godfather!
Daily salaries and job points make it seem like a real life version wherein you have to wait for your money or you could offer protection to some of the newcomers in exchange for money aka mumBHAI style.
All in all, a game that provides for a lot of networking.

Awesome CAT page!

Man! This page is hilarious!
Put out a search for 'real life Tom and Jerry' and this page just popped up!
Your normal Error 404 page is now a CAT ERROR 404 page!

Goa's politics a.k.a. musical chairs

Well, here we go again. The just concluded attempt to dislodge the government having failed, now the breaking news early morning is that the Congress government in Goa is now a minority with 5 MLA's having dumped the ruling coalition. Awesome.
Kinda reminds me of the situation back when I was in std. XII. Almost every week we had to update ourselves on who was in the new government. Rise and fall were in matter of days.
Today's government, I believe, has been in power for about 50 days. Aaaah well, at least SOMEONE representing the country scores a half century!

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Traffic woes...

God! They say Friday the 13th is bad... well the last 24 hours have been incredulous in terms how how people drive. It's not like prior to this there has been perfect road sense displayed by people on the road, but the recent hours have just taken the cake!
I was out yesterday for a Lion's Club function. Since I was extremely bored considering the utter lack of company and NO ONE remotely close to my age group, I decided to go out for a drive. So i'm driving and there's this junction at which I wanted to turn around and go back. The traffic police have blocked a U-turn with barricades and you have to take another road going around the barricades to go back. So I do that. As I am about to go around, there come these smart asses on the bike who decide that going all the way around is a waste of time and hence cut across the barricades thus putting themselves right by my side. Above this they expect me to give them way. When I didn't they started cursing and shouting. I used to pride myself on my patience. NOT ANY MORE. Stop car. Roll down window. Give them a good dose of verbal abuse right back and then give them the choice of calling the cops if they wish to make a complaint against me. Yeah right. And they would explain what?
I drive on. There's a Maruti 800 ahead of me and there's a road connecting the main road from the right. Our man puts the right indicator and begins to turn right. So I dip the lights and overtake. No problemo right? Naah! Our champ has a change of mind and swerves left onto the main road with the right indicator still on. Brakes screech and both vehicles come to a halt. No impact, thankfully. Like I said earlier, lack of patience on my side. So I roll down my window to ask him if he's drunk driving like a maniac around. Guess what? He starts yelling at me!!?? I seriously have got minimal patience given the circumstances. Completely blew up on him Verbally, of course. His right indicator was still on. Fired him inside out and finally he shut up. Sheesh!
I mean, seriously, who wouldn't get mad when you're on a bike going down the right way in a one way street and midway you get a car coming the wrong way with him telling you to go to the side to let him through. Well HELL NO! Do what you want. I ain't moving aside buster. You reverse out of here and let me through. If he refuses, well you can always threaten to call the cops and then what would he do?
But the worst part is when we have places of religious worship just by the side of the road and people park their vehicles on the road to go pay their respects. Well, the road is just about the required width to allow two trucks to pass side by side. Park vehicles on the road? Hell, we got ourselves a one way lane!

It's plain civic sense people! How difficult can that be to understand!

Sunday, July 08, 2007

Voting Farce...

A couple of days back when I was in mumbai, one of my buddies asked me if I had voted for the Taj Mahal in the new 7 wonders of the world list. When I replied in the negative, he exhorted me to exercise my 'right' to vote for the Taj and went on about how we needed to have it on the '7 Wonders of the World' list.
Weird. All this time no one was even bothered about giving the Taj Mahal a second glance and all of a sudden we're being pummelled into exercising our franchise so as to make sure the world knows about the 'Monument of Love'.
Well, i refuse to get into it. Primary reason being that UNESCO has not even recognised this 'new' list. It is a private organisation which just pops out of the blue deciding the world needs a 'new' list of the 'Wonders of the world'. And anyway, who decides on whether a monument is a 'Wonder of the world' just based on people voting via sms and the internet? I mean, the sms's literally mean a whopping windfall of cash flow for the telecom operators. And then we have the government amd the celebrities exhorting the people to make sure the Taj gets into the new list. Well, if the government wants it that bad i'm sure they could just pump in government money into the voting seeing how the money ain't showing any improvement in basic facilities this monsoon across the country.
I mean, how can you even decide on such a list just on the face value of votes?

And above all, if people really love the Taj Mahal so much we wouldn't even need to try to get the Taj Mahal onto the list. It would find it's own way there.